December 25 – Photo – a present to yourself. Sift through all the photos of you from the past year. Choose one that best captures you; either who you are, or who you strive to be. Find the shot of you that is worth a thousand words. Share the image, who shot it, where, and what it best reveals about you.Tough, since I don't really like pictures of myself and wouldn't really want to post one for the world to see (and possibly criticize).
But here's one of me taken today (Dec. 29, 2010) by me at home in our bedroom. It's gross, so I'm posting it at the very bottom of this entry.
I already wrote about the subject a bit -- as I mentioned before, while I was home for Christmas, I got to go to a couple gyms a couple times each. I wore worn out running shoes hubby and I have stored with family across the country. The shoes are great for a few miles of running (and they happily carried me through many training miles). The shoes I learned are not great for much more than a few miles. I ran 8.1 miles on Monday on a treadmill and felt a bit of arch pain. I took Tuesday off, then ran 9.3 on a treadmill on Wednesday in different (but also old shoes) (and I commented about how these shoes seemed better). Then I wore those same shoes Thursday. That day I (1) ran fairly hard for 22 minutes, (2) did a workout with my mom that she got from her trainer (lots of plyometrics, things like short sets of push-ups, squats, etc.), (3) got on the bike for an hour (until it timed me out and I'd almost finished reading my book), and then (4) got back on the treadmill to round out my distance to an even 8 miles. I wanted to run for longer but the arch pain was back. It continued to hurt the whole drive home. I took off my shoes and got my pa to look at it since I was afraid -- sure enough, BLISTER. Ugh.
I don't usually have issues with blisters on my feet while running. It happened once this summer in a freak occurrence (same socks and shoes as always, same terrain as always, etc.) (oh, and if you follow that link, just ignore all that marital stress/frustration stuff, living with someone can be hard!). And now it's happened again this year, but this time the clear cause is old shoes. Possibly treadmill-induced gait change also contributed to the blister, but particularly since it's just on one foot, I'm guessing I would have been fine in my current not-worn-out shoes.
But as gross as it is, this photo describes me well -- I'm very committed to running right now and I have been for a few years. It's sometimes not easy, pain-free, or fun. But this year I put in a lot of work to reach my primary running goal of qualifying for Boston. This photo represents the work I've had to put in to reaching this goal.
The photo describes me both as who I am and who I strive to be. I am someone who's running regularly, despite things like blisters. And I strive to be someone who keeps running with this same dedication for many years to come. But as I've admitted before, whether I remain this committed after Boston will require some serious soul-searching.
So here's the photo. It's the blister on my foot. With a coin for scale, which is a tactic I learned from another blog I've read for a very long time (in theory, a dating chronicles blog, but lots of stuff about life and knitting, which is where she uses the coins). Brace yourself, it's pretty gross.
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